The Icing Wars

The select board of Burdock Falls, Vermont, normally met on the second Tuesday of the month in the back room of the town office, under a calendar from the feed store, and normally the audience was two people and a dog.

On the third Tuesday of June it met in the Grange Hall, because a hundred and forty people had turned up, and some of them had brought folding chairs, and some had brought snacks, and Merle Tibbetts of the Burdock Falls Bugle had brought his camera and was standing on a bench at the back to get the angle.

There was one item on the agenda. Item One: Bicentennial Cake (Award of Contract).

Elias sat in the third row, still in flour from the afternoon, with his arms folded. Across the aisle, in the third row on the other side, in a white jacket that was somehow still pressed at seven o'clock at night, sat Lucien Thibodeau, also with his arms folded, looking at the ceiling as if it had been badly glazed.

The town of Burdock Falls had been chartered on the twentieth of June, 1826. On Saturday it would be two hundred years old. The rest of the country was getting ready for its two hundred and fiftieth on the Fourth of July, and Burdock Falls had decided, as a matter of principle, not to be upstaged by the nation. There would be a parade. There would be the fire department's chicken barbecue. And at noon, in this hall, the Lieutenant Governor of Vermont would cut the Bicentennial Cake: two hundred servings, one for every year.

Two bakeries had bid to make it. They faced each other across Main Street. One was the Burdock Bakeshop, which had been there for thirty-one years, the last six of them Elias's. The other was Pâtisserie Thibodeau, which had been there for three, and had a window that tourists photographed.

Odell Gage, chair of the select board and owner of Gage Hardware, cleared his throat. He had lost the gavel in 2019, and since then he had used a wooden spoon.

"The board," said Odell, "has voted. It's two to two."

The hall made a noise like a large animal turning over.

"I abstained," said Odell, "because I sell to both of them, and I would like to keep selling to both of them, and I would like to keep living here." He looked down at his notes, and then at the ceiling, where Lucien was still looking. "So the board has decided that the Bicentennial Cake will be co-catered."

Silence.

"Jointly," said Odell. "By both."

Lucien Thibodeau stood up.

"Non," he said. And sat down.

Elias stood up.

"For once," Elias said, "I agree with him."

The hall applauded, for a long time, as though this was the most exciting thing that had happened in Burdock Falls since the covered bridge flooded in 2011. Merle's camera went off three times. Somebody at the back shouted, "Bake-off!" and was shushed by somebody else, who shouted, "Duel!"

Odell banged the spoon.

"It's decided," he said. "I'm handing over to the Bicentennial coordinator."

Bunny Szymanski rose from the front row. She was seventy, and five foot one, and had spent thirty-four years as an air-traffic controller at Burlington, and she held a clipboard the way other people held a fire extinguisher.

"Listen up," said Bunny. "You'll both work out of this kitchen. Wednesday to Saturday. Six a.m. start." She pointed at the swing doors behind the stage. "Two hundred servings. On the table at noon Saturday. The committee will select the recipe by Friday from your submissions. It has to have something from 1826 in it. I don't care what. Questions?"

Elias turned, and found that Lucien had turned too, and was looking at him across the aisle with an expression of profound, almost scientific, suspicion.

Elias got up, crossed the aisle, and held out a hand.

Lucien looked at it. He looked at it for so long, and with such care, that Elias began to wonder if there was flour on it, and then remembered that there was.

"It is," said Lucien at last, "covered in something."

"It's pastry flour," said Elias. "You'd know, if you used any."

The third row went ooh. Merle took another picture. Elias went back across the aisle with the hand still unshaken, and Odell put his face in his hands.

Bunny was not finished.

She came down the aisle with a roll of blue painter's tape and went through the swing doors into the kitchen, and the whole hall got up and followed her, and stood in the doorway in a crowd and watched as she laid a single straight blue line down the middle of the floor. It ran across the tiles, and up the front of the big steel island, and over the top, and down the other side, and across the door of the one huge old oven, which there was only one of, and which nobody had thought about until that moment.

She tore off the tape with her teeth.

"That," said Bunny, "is the Line. Bakeshop on the left. Pâtisserie on the right. Nobody crosses the Line without clearance." She looked from Elias to Lucien and back again. "Copy?"

"Copy," said Elias.

"Oui," said Lucien.

"I'll take that as a copy," said Bunny. "See you at six."